C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s version of À la recherche du temps
perdu has in the past fifty years earned a reputation as one of the
great English translations, almost as a masterpiece in its own
right. Why then should it need revision? Why tamper with a
work that has been enjoyed and admired, not to say revered, by
several generations of readers throughout the English-speaking
world?
The answer is that the original French edition from which
Scott Moncrieff worked (the “abominable” edition of the
Nouvelle Revue Française, as Samuel Beckett described it in a
marvellous short study of Proust which he published in 1931)
was notoriously imperfect. This was not so much the fault of the
publishers and printers as of Proust’s methods of composition.
Only the first volume (Du côté de chez Swann) of the novel as
originally conceived—and indeed written—was published
before the 1914-1918 war. The second volume was set up in
type, but publication was delayed, and moreover by that time
Proust had already begun to reconsider the scale of the novel;
the remaining eight years of his life (1914-1922) were spent in
expanding it from its original 500,000 words to more than a
million and a quarter. The margins of proofs and typescripts
were covered with scribbled corrections and insertions, often
overflowing on to additional sheets which were glued to the
galleys or to one another to form interminable strips—what
Françoise in the novel calls the narrator’s “paperoles.” The
unravelling and deciphering of these copious additions cannot
have been an enviable task for editors and printers.
Furthermore, the last three sections of the novel (La
prisonnière, La fugitive—originally called Albertine disparue—
and Le temps retrouvé) had not yet been published at the time
of Proust’s death in November 1922 (he was still correcting a
xvi
typed copy of La prisonnière on his deathbed). Here the original
editors had to take it upon themselves to prepare a coherent text
from a manuscript littered with sometimes hasty corrections,
revisions and afterthoughts and leaving a number of unresolved
contradictions, obscurities and chronological inconsistencies. As
a result of all this the original editions—even of the volumes
published in Proust’s lifetime—pullulate with errors,
misreadings and omissions.
In 1954 a revised three-volume edition of À la recherche
was published in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. The
editors, M. Pierre Clarac and M. André Ferré, had been charged
by Proust’s heirs with the task of “establishing a text of his novel
as faithful as possible to his intentions.” With infinite care and
patience they examined all the relevant material—manuscripts,
notebooks, typescripts, proofs, as well as the original edition—
and produced what is generally agreed to be a virtually
impeccable transcription of Proust’s text. They scrupulously
avoided the arbitrary emendations, the touchings-up, the
wholesale reshufflings of paragraphs in which the original
editors indulged, confining themselves to clarifying the text
wherever necessary, correcting errors due to haste or
inadvertence, eliminating careless repetitions and rationalising
the punctuation (an area where Proust was notoriously casual).
They justify and explain their editorial decisions in detailed
critical notes, occupying some 200 pages over the three volumes,
and print all the significant variants as well as a number of
passages that Proust did not have time to work into his book.
The Pléiade text differs from that of the original edition,
mostly in minor though none the less significant ways,
throughout the novel. In the last three sections (the third Pléiade
volume) the differences are sometimes considerable. In
particular, MM. Clarac and Ferré have included a number of
passages, sometimes of a paragraph or two, sometimes of several
pages, which the original editors omitted for no good reason.
xvii
The present translation is a reworking, on the basis of the
Pléiade edition, of Scott Moncrieff’s version of the first six
sections of À la recherche—or the first eleven volumes of the
twelve-volume English edition. A post-Pléiade version of the
final volume, Le temps retrouvé (originally translated by
Stephen Hudson after Scott Moncrieff’s death in 1930), was
produced by the late Andreas Mayor and published in 1970;
with some minor emendations, it is incorporated in this edition.
There being no indication in Proust’s manuscript as to where La
fugitive should end and Le temps retrouvé begin, I have
followed the Pléiade editors in introducing the break some pages
earlier than in the previous editions, both French and English—
at the beginning of the account of the Tansonville episode.
The need to revise the existing translation in the light of the
Pléiade edition has also provided an opportunity of correcting
mistakes and misinterpretations in Scott Moncrieff’s version.
Translation, almost by definition, is imperfect; there is always
“room for improvement,” and it is only too easy for the
latecomer to assume the beau rôle. I have refrained from
officious tinkering for its own sake, but a translator’s loyalty is
to the original author, and in trying to be faithful to Proust’s
meaning and tone of voice I have been obliged, here and there,
to make extensive alterations.
A general criticism that might be levelled against Scott
Moncrieff is that his prose tends to the purple and the
precious—or that this is how he interpreted the tone of the
original: whereas the truth is that, complicated, dense,
overloaded though it often is, Proust’s style is essentially natural
and unaffected, quite free of preciosity, archaism or selfconscious
elegance. Another pervasive weakness of Scott
Moncrieff’s is perhaps the defect of a virtue. Contrary to a
widely held view, he stuck very closely to the original (he is
seldom guilty of short-cuts, omissions or loose paraphrases),
and in his efforts to reproduce the structure of those elaborate
xviii
sentences with their spiralling subordinate clauses, not only
does he sometimes lose the thread but he wrenches his syntax
into oddly unEnglish shapes: a whiff of Gallicism clings to some
of the longer periods, obscuring the sense and falsifying the
tone. A corollary to this is a tendency to translate French idioms
and turns of phrase literally, thus making them sound weirder,
more outlandish, than they would to a French reader. In
endeavouring to rectify these weaknesses, I hope I have
preserved the undoubted felicity of much of Scott Moncrieff
while doing the fullest possible justice to Proust.
I should like to thank Professor J. G. Weightman for his
generous help and advice and Mr D. J. Enright for his patient
and percipient editing.
TERENCE KILMARTIN

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews